We climbed down the other side of the wall, I looking over my shoulder at every opportunity. Stopping off at the ground, my feet coming to rest in this unfamiliar ground, I raised the rifle and kept it there in front of me. Everybody else kept their eyes open.
All four of us had gone nights without sleep before – it was just another thing in this world that we had to get used to because of the sheer number of things out to kill us.
Right then I had little doubt that they were all as wide awake as I was.
The sun had been rising on Ashby for two days now, presuming the infected had come to us based on the timelines in my head. After two days in the sun the flies had come out, and the things had begun to rot.
‘That’s fucking awful,’ Leah muttered. ‘I can’t believe this…’
I don’t think any of us could have believed the reality of it, but here it was, right in front of us.
In the midst of it all I had a flashback to the aftermath we had confronted when we had left the basement all those years ago, when we had stayed down there for a week before coming outside to see the new version of the world that awaited us. Henrietta had tried to keep us away from it, from seeing the chaos in the streets and the aftermath of the infection.
I thought back to her, to what had happened to her. Not even Marcus and Maria had her throughout the attack.
I returned my mind to the situation at hand, shaking my head and looking out ahead of me, searching for any sign of movement. I looked over every body that lay in our path – all had horrendous wounds to the head and neck, and many had very visible bite marks scattered about over their skin.
I had no doubt that those whose bite marks we couldn’t see would possess them somewhere on their body.
We made it to a clear patch of the road, stopping off outside of one of the abandoned houses.
‘This is insane,’ Robbie muttered, ‘I can’t fucking believe this…’
‘I think we’ve got our answer as to who it was that attacked us,’ Hayley said.
‘I just don’t know where we go from here…’ Leah said. ‘What are we supposed to do now?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I mean, I didn’t expect to show up here and find a piece of paper with ‘clue’ written on it. This person, this woman that Morgan spoke about… She was here. They brought her in, just like we brought him in. The only difference is we know where he came from. We’ve got no idea where she came from to get here.’
‘I just wish it really was as simple as finding a piece of paper with ‘clue’ written on it. Either way we still can’t get Bastion back.’
‘I’ll do whatever it takes,’ I said, ‘and I know the rest of you will, too.’
‘Oh, shit-’
I spun my head, glancing over at Leah as she glared across the street at the opposite house from where we stood.
I couldn’t react fast enough to the sight of the hooded figure in the doorway. My hands seemed to act of their own volition as I raised the rifle, pointing the barrel at the doorway.
‘Don’t fucking move,’ I shouted, my heart racing, ready to fire if I saw even the glimmer of a weapon. I expected a fight, either for them to start firing or for the hood to fall and for them to come running at us with a bloody face, gnashing teeth and wild eyes.
Turns out it was neither.
The figure took off, running back through the open doorway of the house, leaving us in an odd state of quiet. Nothing demanded that we run after the person, so we stayed put.
‘I don’t think this is an ambush,’ I said. ‘If it was they wouldn’t be clamouring about in a town filled with dead bodies.’
‘Who do you think that was, then?’ Robbie asked.
I lowered the rifle, looking over at him by my side.
‘Last man standing.’
We set off towards the house, Hayley keeping a lookout at the back as we made our way into the house. Things might have seemed normal were it not for the fact that everything had been thrown to the ground or overturned. I thought back to Mae and Larry’s house as we stopped in the dark, small entrance hall.
‘If you’re in here,’ I shouted, ‘and if you can hear us, I want you to know that we mean you no harm. We’re from Bastion. I’m giving you the chance to come out in the next ten seconds, and we can have a friendly chat. That’s all. Like I said, we don’t want to hurt you. We’re ready when you are.’
Leah looked at me like I was insane, but I nodded at her to let her know I had it under control. I signalled back out and we left the hallway, stepping out into the sunlight, out onto the road.
We all kept our eyes on the house, and in the sunlight I caught the flicker of the blinds on the upper floor in my line of sight. The moment I made eye contact with the hooded figure the blinds closed again. They were watching us for sure.
But who were they?
We waited, seeing no further movement before us. Then-
‘All right… All right, I’m coming out. Please don’t shoot me.’
The voice came from through the open door. We all waited cautiously as we heard the footsteps coming down the stairs. I intended to keep my word, but as I knew that our guest was slowly approaching us I had to resist raising the rifle, keeping myself desperately in check as I fought to remain on the defensive rather than the offensive.
Finally the figure emerged in the doorway, still hooded in the cloak that they had been wearing. They walked out into the sunlight, seemingly apprehensively.
‘Who are you?’ I asked. ‘How are you still here?’
‘I didn’t have anywhere else to go,’ a man’s voice said, and with that he removed the hood. I found myself looking at a dark haired man in his mid-30s, with tired eyes and a furrowed brow. ‘I’m… I’m James.’
‘Okay… James…?’ I said sceptically, feeling the air of weariness that the stances of my friends gave off. ‘Who are you? And what happened here?’
‘I lived here… This was my home, before… Before…’
‘You know who we are, don’t you?’ I said, looking him in the eye. ‘You know what Bastion is?’
‘Yes. You’re the community in the next town, aren’t you? Helena speaks about you… Spoke about you a lot. She liked you. Said she admired you and how we got along with you.’
‘Spoke?’ I said. ‘So she’s dead?’
‘They all are… I’m the only one left.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Why would I joke about such a thing?’
‘I… Yeah, of course… I’m sorry.’
He was an odd man. He didn’t speak with an accent, or with any vernacular habits – he spoke the language exactly as it was supposed to be spoken, as if he was reeling off his responses from a massive back catalogue that he had rehearsed, like a robot.
‘You all look very tired. Would you like to come inside? I have plenty of food and water.’
I looked about at my three companions. All of them silently agreed – I could tell by the expression on their faces that they needed to rest, and so did I.
‘All right,’ I said, nodding at him reassuringly. ‘One wrong move and I take your head off, though. Deal?’
‘No wrong moves,’ he said, taking a deep breath. ‘Yes.’
***
I didn’t know what to think of James, or Ashby. I wasn’t intimidated, that was for sure – even if the air of death hung over the place infallibly.
Despite the overturned objects we had seen from the hallway, the place seemed in at a halfway point of repair. Things had been tidied and rearranged upon closer inspection, and as we sat in the dining room of James’s house, I keeping a relaxed but cautious hold on the rifle as he returned from the kitchen with a tray of water and baked bread, I tried to put the questions in my mind into some coherent order.
We all took up some food as James sat at the other end of the table quietly, the vague echo of a smile on his face.
‘What happened to you happened to us,’ I said, finishing up my cup of water. ‘Th
at is what happened to you, isn’t it? The infected?’
He seemed stunted by the question, not exactly to my surprise. Everybody stopped eating, even if they were halfway through a bite of bread, and watched James from across the table. He remained quiet for a long time, as if deliberating on his words, before finally speaking.
‘There was only one to begin with. She came from the south. Arrived at our gates one night in a completely hysterical state. Couldn’t speak, couldn’t communicate. Terrible, terrible fever, and her arms were riddled with these bite marks. I tried to say that that was what they were, but nobody would listen to me. They just assumed they were thorns. She managed to tell us that her name was Sarah before she collapsed.’
‘What happened after that?’
Our medical people looked after her at the hospital…’
‘The hospital?’
‘It’s what we call the house we use for treating anyone who’s sick. Helena did that with everything. She said everything should have a name and a place just like it did in the old world, that this town was our world now…’
Leah shot me a glance, the kind that silently commented on the oddity of the statement, but I shook my head and returned to James.
‘What happened when you took her back to the hospital?’
‘She died that night. Many of us stayed awake, because we couldn’t sleep knowing that we had somebody new within the walls. We always like to introduce new members and bring them in to our way of life, but when she died… Well, it cast something of a shadow over us, one that made the night even darker.
‘Helena had a policy of burying people as soon as they passed, to pass them back to the Earth from which they came. We all headed out to the site where we bury those amongst us that fall. She was on a stretcher, wrapped up in a sheet, but from the front there were suddenly murmurs and screams. She had begun to move inside of her sheet. Those around her hurried as quickly as they could to get her out of the sheet – we thought that she was suffocating, that we had made a mistake about her death, but when the sheet was unfolded…’
‘She had turned,’ Hayley interrupted, gazing over at him.
‘I suppose you could say that,’ James continued. ‘I don’t quite know what it was that she turned into, but she began to bite everybody that she could. Her eyes were blue and this terrible snarl came from her, like the growl of a wild animal. She must have bitten six or seven of our people before one of the guards shot her. The bullet hit her in the chest but she just kept moving, so they shot her in the head and she went down for good.
‘It was chaos… We didn’t know what to do. We thought that that was the end of it, and we left those who had been bitten in the hospital for the night, but the next morning when somebody went to check on them… They were just like her. They attacked everyone, biting them, sinking their teeth into them, ripping them apart. Some managed to make it away, but eventually they turned into those things, too. I’m not quite sure how it works… Some people they kill, some they infect, some take a long time to change and others can turn in less than an hour. Perhaps it’s random, I don’t…
‘Anyway… When it was happening I was inside my home. Here. I have a crawlspace in the wardrobe in my bedroom. I don’t like large open spaces… I hid in there for more than a day until the screaming outside stopped. It went on for so long, then everything went quiet. When I came outside there were the bodies in the street, and a few in the houses, but everybody else was gone. I don’t know where they went. I’ve been meaning to clear them up, but I don’t know how to do it, so… I just stayed here. Until you four showed up.’
I took in everything that he had said, running over it all in my mind. Every other citizen from Ashby, other than James, was either dead or infected. It didn’t bode well for whoever might have made it out of Bastion.
It was just another piece of bad news that sent me running my hands over my face in a mix of frustration and sadness.
‘And… you don’t know where this woman came from? Sarah?’ I asked, looking across the table at him.
‘No. She came from the south gate, that’s all I know. Helena said that there were cities in the southern parts of the country, huge communities that made ours look tiny. She thinks that it might have originated there, but I’m not so sure.’
‘Why’s that?’ Hayley asked.
‘Something like this… It took out our community, and yours, in a matter of days. If it broke loose in a city, or somewhere with a massive population, it would spread like wildfire. All these people cramped together. It’s the best environment for an infection. So I don’t think it could have come from one of those… Unless they sent it here.’
‘Sent it?’ Robbie said quickly.
‘Like a biological weapon. There are no more armies anymore, no more bombs or warheads. If there are, they’re deep underground. Sending something like this in to wipe us out is the easiest way. Causes less of a mess.’
‘But how could somewhere have the kind of resources to come up with something like this?’ I said, asking myself the question as much as I was asking James.
‘There are far fewer people in this world than there used to be… When I was a teenager, I figured out that based on global GDP and the total value of worldly assets, by rough estimates, if the entire wealth of the planet was evenly divided up between everybody, each person on the planet would only have around $7000. Imagine how much that number would be now if it were divided up between the few people left on this planet? Funny thing is that money doesn’t matter anymore. Resources take a different form. But I’ll bet a lot of resources from before the apocalypse are still around, and in a world without TV, and where there are bound to be a few smart people, somebody, somewhere will have spent the time to figure out how these things work.
‘I’m good with numbers. I think that’s why Helena liked me so much. She always looked after me. She was always nice to me, even when so many of the other people in Ashby weren’t. She let me live here by myself as long as I looked after the books, the totals of all the resource the town had, stock levels, things like that. I like doing things like that… Now I don’t know what to do.’
It occurred to me the kind of person James was pretty early on – cognitively intelligent to the point that it affected his ability to interact with people. I liked him pretty much immediately, because he was his own person, even when the world was working against him as much as it was now.
I thought over everything he had said, the complexity, and at the same time, the legitimacy of it all. I didn’t know whether it was the surety with which James had said all of this – I didn’t consider myself to be someone who was easily swayed – but I agreed with his notions, these ideas he had put forward. He didn’t know where the infection had come from, that much I knew, but he had some damn good ideas about where it might have.
Everybody was sat in silence, and after a while I realised that Leah, Robbie and Hayley were all looking back and forth between me and James. I was the negotiator here.
Fortunately, I already had a plan.
‘James… I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t know if anybody from Bastion is even still alive, but I’m pretty sure that the surrounding areas, and the town itself, will be swarming with the infected. I want to get back inside and put things back to the way they were. If I can’t do that, then I want to start the place again. That community is all I know, and I’ll do whatever I can to take it back.
‘If we manage that, I’d like to invite you in as our new bookkeeper. You can start afresh and operate just as you did before. We’ll set you up in your own house, and you can work in the same way that you did here. What do you think?’
James looked at me, then between all of my companions, then back to myself. A steady smile rose on his face, and he nodded.
‘I think that I would like that.’
‘I’m glad to hear that,’ I continued. ‘My only problem is that we don’t have the means to get back into Bastion right now. I’ve n
o doubt the infected will outnumber us enormously, and we don’t have the means to fight them. Before, you mentioned that somebody shot Sarah before she turned. Do you happen to have any more weapons or… Resources, that we might be able to use to get rid of the infected back at Bastion?’
James looked across at me, not blankly, but in an absolutely unreadable fashion. He glared at me, right up to the point that I was about to ask if he was all right, before speaking.
‘I have a full inventory in my records. Just a moment.’
He got up from the table, heading off into the living room next door. Just out of sight I saw him carefully unlocking a large metal container and opening it, flicking through the meticulously arranged contents.
‘You sure we can trust this guy?’ Robbie said over my shoulder.
‘We don’t have a choice. We’re pretty much out of options right now. I’m only making it look like we have them.’
In no time James returned with a filing folder in his hands. It was one of those odd items you saw scattered across the floors of stores from the old world, the kind of thing that pretty much everybody had zero use for in this day and age – except for James.
He opened the folder and began flicking through the pages. They were all hand-written in a perfectly consistent style. Finally he came to a stop at a certain page and spun the folder around to face me, before sliding it across the table.
I looked over the writings of the ledger, as my brain processed the long list before me, I felt my heart begin to race.
Obviously my three companions peaked over my shoulder, looking over the list in front of them.
‘Holy fucking shit,’ Leah muttered quietly.
‘Indeed,’ James broke in flatly.
‘Do you have access to all of this stuff?’ I asked, looking up at James.
‘I’m the only one who does. Helena trusted me more than anyone.’
‘Could you take us to it?’
Chapter Seventeen
Lock and Key
‘We kept everything in the basement of an empty house.’
Fall of Earth (Book 1): The Survivors of Bastion Page 14
